Oskaloosa, Ia. — In a campaign speech to potential caucusgoers here this afternoon, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann colored her calls for the repeal of the federal health-care law passed in 2010 with a brief history of health care.

When she was a child, she said, a visit to the doctor in Waterloo, Iowa, cost just $5, and people who couldn’t afford that often would receive free care at the physician’s discretion.

Such prices and charity care are impossible today, she argued, because of government intervention into the health-care system and the threat of lawsuits.

It’s an anecdote — and a political argument — Bachmann has made repeatedly on the campaign trail recently.

Some analysis, however, calls into question whether that specific health-care cost today is actually more than what Bachmann recalls from several decades ago.

The $5 doctor’s visit Bachmann cites, for example, leaves out the effect of inflation. Five dollars in 1961 (the year in which Bachmann turned 5 years old) actually has the same buying power as $37.94 in 2011. And that, according to at least one study, is substantially more than what an average worker now pays for a doctor’s visit.

A statistical brief compiled last month by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that the average co-pay for a physician’s office visit under employee-sponsored health-care programs in 2010 was $22.82 — 40 percent less than the inflation-adjusted cost of Bachmann’s 1961 doctor’s visit.

(The Register noted yesterday that Bachmann’s proposal for a “liability shield” for doctors providing charity care is similar to a program already in effect in Iowa.)